Benjamin Noys’ Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero 2014) is a really impressive little book not because it offers a scathing critique of the accelerationists – a panzer tank to squash a gnat anyone? – nor because it pierces the commonplace anxiety that everything is speeding up – in a stagnant phase of capital accumulation, that speed hype is particularly transparent. No, I like the book because Noys loves the word equivocation and uses it with dextrous abandon. First of all Marx on India, p9, equivocal it ‘appears’, on the results of British colonial plunder in India (the footnote to Aijaz Ahmad will be worth following up, since limiting Marx’s discussion of the subcontinent to only the first of a great many NYDT articles on India perpetrates a fraud). This pattern is established early – the accelerationists believe the worst will produce the good. Variations on the theme abound – and it cannot but leave us saying ‘yes, but’. BUT, the best parts of the book do not owe much at all to the avowed ‘enemy’ here – the discussion of Bataille and Godard – Bataille is ‘equivocal’ on 76 – is the shit. Literally, and the excremental analysis of capitalism accords well with, after all, Marx’s own assessment of economics – he wanted to be done with that shit. Then a chapter on Brecht and Benjamin – ‘equivocal’ on 90 – gives a deep and careful evaluation of the train brake metaphor, observing actual wrecks and actual saves where the brake interrupts disaster. That Benjamin can be offered as the theorist impatient with waiting, 92, is perhaps somewhat sad given his end, but there is much to learn about the more cuddly of the Frankfurt School theorists. A pity though that Adorno is described as ‘mordant’ (41) only to be (unintentionally) plagiarised later on where the two torn halves of a culture that cannot be put back together is lifted from Adorno’s critique of Benjamin without acknowledgement (98 – Adorno to Benjamin 18 March 1936). Equivocation indeed, but who can disagree with great bon mots such as ‘The “left” failing to go all the way to capitalism (and not all the way to the left…)’ that would exempt us from heading with Nick Land towards ‘neo-China’? Instead, this book will tarry with Lyotard, Sade, Stalin, Lovecraft, D&G, Gibson, Detroit Techno and Pynchon (with Adorno again too simply ‘pessimistic’ 45 – could we not be equivocal here too?). The lessons on the USSR and Trotsky are well-taken, the section on Lukács, HArdt/NeGri, Badiou impressive, the Benjamin heartfelt. Noys’ will neither be rushing to the handbrake nor pushing the pedal to the floor – his opposition to privatization and outsourcing of services, for campaigns which offer a return to public control, to ‘protect benefits’, to ‘sustain social and collective forms of support’ and to ‘attack’ the way ‘work is supposed to account for our own self-reproduction’ and its ‘ideological and material role’ in the ‘validation of citizenship’ (99) all seem eminently reasonable and sound parts of a Marxist critique. It is not rocket science. My petty concerns about a citation for Adorno do not disqualify this as a near flawless book, except perhaps for the false publicity it gives the woolly thinking of accelerations, futurists and fascists beneath Noys’ elephant gun. Crush them in the egg I agree – I suppose there need be no equivocation there. This is a welcome call to join the struggle against the total commodification of our lives.

40 years after it was first published in French, the impact of Michel Foucault’s seminal text Discipline and Punish on theories of incarceration, discipline and power remains largely unchallenged. The aim of this conference is to revisit the text in light of the past four decades of penal developments, public debate and social consciousness on incarceration as it continues to constitute society’s mode of punishment par excellence.

In addition to thinking through the legacy of Discipline and Punish and its continued relevance today, specific focus will be given to the text itself, its position within Foucault’s wider critical project and its important relationship with his activism most notably the work of the GIP [Groupe d’Information sur les prisons] during the early 1970s. For example, the publication in 2013 of his 1973 lectures at theCollège de France on La Société Punitive, calls for a return to this period and a new engagement with Foucault’s work on prisons, not least in its pursuit of a more openly Marxist critique of the relationship between incarceration and bourgeois capital accumulation.

Here, attention should also be paid to Foucault’s methodology in researching and writing the text. Discipline and Punish marks his movement from an archeological to a genealogical approach towards what he terms the ‘history of the present.’ What is at stake in this shift and how effective is his genealogical method for thinking through the material and discursive structures of incarceration operating within our own society and moment? How does the juxtaposition set up between the torture and killing of Damiens and the prison timetable of the book’s opening raise important questions not simply about punishment but the role of representation – images and narratives of incarceration – in framing public consciousness about the space of the prison?

It is hoped that the conference will bring together a range of participants: scholars working in the fields of philosophy, sociology, criminology, urban geography, architecture, history, literature, media studies as well as artists, writers and activists involved in projects based in and about prisons and their conditions.

If you would like to offer a paper or other form of intervention, please send us a 250 word abstract along with your name, e-mail and (if relevant) institutional affiliation. If you would like to organize a panel of 3 or 4 presenters, please also send a panel title along with the abstracts and contact details.

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Campaign to Change the street name of Karakolhane to NUH KÖKLÜ Caddesi

On Tuesday night, February 17th 2015, our friend the journalist Nuh Köklü was stabbed because a snowball hit the window of a shopkeeper. The murderer is encouraged by a slogan of President Erdoğan, which says: ‘My local shopkeeper is soldier, police and judge, if necessary’. In Turkey people like Nuh are always under the threat of a government which legitimizes aggression against anyone with a point of view that does not conform. This is displayed even in street names.

We now want to change the street name of Karakolhane Caddesi, which refers to a prison famous for torture in the 90s, to the Name of NUH KÖKLÜ.

English (and German in comments) statement on horrific snowball killing here.

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I am writing on the relation of illicit and informal labour to formal labour, the unpaid component of capital as embodied, lived, precarious and immaterially material as a way of keeping all workers in a kind of check – aspirations and opportunities limited by affective restraint, low horizons and opportunity. How this plays out in the informal and illicit economies of nightlife, port life, smuggling, contraband, covert and dysfunctional piracies…

Conceptions of ‘labour’ have relied for too long on an unexamined conventional definition based upon working hours which ignores Marx’s radical and innovative extended argument in Capital. Labour, in Marx’s unfolding presentation, is first of all labour-power, but in a changing sense. His analysis proceeds from simple reproduction to collective – a movement replicated in individual chapters and in the book as a whole. By the later chapters of volume one, the issue is the maintenance of a separation between productive consumption in the workplace and consumption that reproduces collective labour power. A distinction maintained by the wage form, with responsibility for reproduction – food, shelter, training, domestic life, childrearing etc – delegated to non-work or unpaid ‘free’ time.

Capital cannot exist materially without this immense trick of ‘free time’. In addition to receiving without fee the ‘surplus’ created above reproduction by labour in the workplace, capital also benefits in various ways from the materiality of unwaged time. The informality of this time of reproduction, of unpaid labour in the home, in training, in community, even in recovering, through sleep, for work the next day – all this time has become saturated with commodification, from school books and domestic appliances to therapies and alarm clocks. Nightlife and homelife become the shadowy extension of labour time (Adorno) subject to an affective recovery work, replenishing that which capital appropriates for free. ‘free in a double sense’ Marx says, and today, more than ever, all of our time is monetized as such ‘free time’

from this, from studies of the informal sector, it becomes possible to say…

…well, there will be a case study on informal economies in port cultures, piracy or some such. To be worked out closer to the date…

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What can we learn about contemporary politics of work, service economy and culture industry from an old book from 1867? We can read – precisely in Chapter 25 of Marx’s Capital – a long disquisition on the industrial reserve army (LW628 section three of chapter 25). Much of the chapter is also on wages (and therefor probably moved from the once promised book on wages) and was included to emphasise the trick of accumulated capital – as unpaid labour power of a collective kind. If today the contribution economy, algorithms of advertising and circulation, and struggles over democracy in the media and on the street are questions of precarious life, does it matter that many have misunderstood Marx’s argument, his movement from individual worker to collective worker, and simple reproduction to capitalist reproduction, in Capital? If his argument is credited, then the ‘prekärer’ is the condition of all precarious workers (P793 D669 LW640), and all reproduction within capitalism is precarious. We then have to consider the proximity of the floating, latent and stagnant reserve army that keeps everyone ducking and diving to stay in place, keeps aspirations in check, keeps wages down, and is an unavoidable question of inside and outside that must always be put under pressure. Where Marx calls for workers and unemployed to organise together, we miss a trick if the sociological analysis remains at the level of the individual not collective. In this analysis, Capital is many, but the ‘we’ is more. What does this mean 150 years later for the organisation of social movements such that may or may not be linked to Occupy (Gezi, Umbrella, Indignados, Dataran).

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Here are my notes, thinking out loud. Sorry if there seems like I am telling you what you already told us in your text – but there are things I need to clarify for myself, hence the ‘you said this’, then ‘this’ roundabouts. I think it is, well, you surely know already I think its great, so…

I think it is a really important thing to discuss this issue of reproduction first. Not third… and we should think of this challenge – to put reproduction at the centre of the analysis – as something that Marx does perhaps too slowly for readers today, but it is there in his Umschlag in the second half of the book. Umschlag is transformation, or tipping point, and there is a moment in the book – well, many really, but clear ones in chapter 16 – collective worker – and chapter 23 – where this is crucial. [and of course, as well as change, Umschlag is envelope, and all those associations of coat, skin, husk need to be held to the side].

We should dwell on what has happened here in terms of the unfolding analysis of capitalism in the book and why it matters for how we describe things – like commodification of all aspects of life, like labour power, like skills, training, discipline… I would risk, hesitantly, saying that I think Marx leads us to a possibly unavoidable misconstrual when he does not explicitly talk about reproduction of the class relation until section seven of Capital, and even there still sets aside the place of child rearing, women etc – he says he will come back to it… and perhaps does – this is not my main point here even as it is possible to make the case that though Marx several times mentions the matter of reproduction of the working class, he did not deal in detail until parts of volume 2 with the division 1 and division 2 of consumption/labour fund stuff, and even then… Nevertheless there are comments in several of the chapters in vol 1, especially at the beginning of chapter 17 where he notes the ‘great variations in the cost of reproducing the workers family’ (P.656 D.542) only to immediately exclude consideration till later…. then in chapter 22 consideration is required – ‘therefore we must take into account’ – of factors that impact upon the value of labour power: ‘the price and extent of the prime necessities of life’, as developed at a certain stage in history, the ‘cost of training the workers’, the ‘part played by women and children’ (P701, D.583)….

Bare me out, why I think your article is important, but why I think Marx leads us to a misconstrual – well, it may not matter that much, but it effects your phrasing a little and I am trying to get to that, however much I am convinced that the tone is right, that the total(litarian) commodification of reproduction – in the west, and the west in the east etc – has to be confronted. Let me try to be clear, it is where you write:

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‘Under capitalism, we reproduce human beings as labour power, or as potential labour power. We reproduce people as workers. As class subjects – who are disciplined, educated, skilled and moulded – to as the saying goes “to know their place”. Be it to rule, to be the manager or to work like a dog for someone else’ (Barbagallo 2014).

My point is going to be that this is good, to talk of labour power, yet there is a problem as far as it stands for simple reproduction in the abstract individual sense – a mother wiping snot from a nose – and stands for simple production in the abstract (and fictive, necessary for the analysis) simple production of value for a single capital. The story unfolds though, that’s the point. Marx had to explain labour power first. He starts with the single labourer confronting the single capitalist in the market (actually he starts with the single commodity, then moves to market. He starts with simple production so as to explain labour power, in the chapter on the working day he moves from the voice of one worker to the workers banded together to demand the ten hour day. I am stressing a pattern here. So when he gets to talk about how a single capital must already find the worker in place, ready to sell labour capacity (and only having that to sell) there has been a similar shift from simple reproduction to complex reproduction, from one worker to the collective worker and from one capital to many capitals. This happens in chapters 16, 17, 22, 23, but it was already happening in Working Day, in Co-operation. – labour, whether paid or unpaid, is social.

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It is in this sense that Marx then points out that the capitalist system must reproduce the whole capitalist system, inclusive of those who do not work, who themselves do not produce surplus value. It must find already available, more or less, many possible labour powers, ready in the market, but also supported already, by others who will not be waged, but who have ben produced by capital. The class relation is already there, and must be reproduced in all its horrific, violent gore – the best bits of your argument are those that recognise this violent fucked up ness of contemporary reproduction… but capital must find the socialised worker already in place, and then, hire only some of them. The rest, they also helpfully there, reproduced, but not for wages – they may be those who are part of the ‘collective labourer’ who merely facilitate another persons labour, eg teachers (when they are not selling a product, but teaching to improve skill levels in another), mothers (in all the ways you say), but also community, religion, neighbours etc (as I have said before) and it is also that they, some of ‘the rest’ may be actually unproductive, in that they will not find work, or only some work – latent, stagnant, floating, and so even will even not be trained, barely disciplined – but they will still – more or less usefully, be of use to capital – and will fall into the reserve army of labour – helping keep wages (costs to capital) down, through keeping everyone in work scrimping and saving and conforming to order because there is this reserve army ready to step in… All in all, the formation of class subjects is the formation of this multifariously directly productive, secondarily productive, and sometimes unproductive class subject – collectively, the class that the capitalists needs to have reproduced over and over. The class relation.

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What I am getting at is that here, the notion of labour power – the entire labour theory of value – is Umschlag – it tips, does not work the same way from the perspective of the whole, from the perspective of the socialised collective labourer (that would include the wiping of noses alongside the operation of a drill). A transformation as Marx’s analysis adopts the perspective of the whole.

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Social Reproduction means a wider concept of labour power, involving our collective social capacity, and, under Capital, our incapacities (proletarianisation of all via commodification, or the so-called culture industry).

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Marx talks about the great deceit that has been perpetrated in which responsibility for this reproduction is placed upon the worker in so-called ‘free’ time, which is time outside of waged time. This trick is another part of that trick that perpetrates the myth that value is produced only in paid work time, and reproduction of labour capacity is unwaged. All the brunt of this was there in the discussions of training, child-rearing etc, but Marx in volume one might have been more explicit of the enormity of this – he does offer his examples about how even meals became the responsibility of the worker – no eating on the job. etc. But there he is too often still talking differentiated worker, not collective class that includes the reserve of floating, latent, stagnant labour etc that also makes up the class relation.

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To say class subjects are those “who are disciplined, educated, skilled and moulded” then is to overstate the case in line with the trick that capital wants to pull. The pretty fucked up violence of capitalist reproduction as you rightly mention, is hidden right there in another version of that trick. That ‘we’ are all lovely skilled-up, ready-to-work, instruments of labour, when I think many of us are untrained, unmoulded, and otherwise unshaped so as to not be productive workers at all, to have ‘shit jobs’ in the DG sense, to be relatively dysfunctional for capital in terms of its myth of singular labour power. Yet Capital even uses this. So that when we talk of really existing collective or socialised production under capital, the notion of labour capacity is something that has been replaced for many with a useless filler, so much flabby culture industry consumption, pointless activity, madness, indolence, alienated activity, deferral, delegation to paid ‘carers’ who do not care, and so on…

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I totally agree with the direction of this and want to try and get it clear that the violence of reproduction is in this trick that suggests that reproductive work is not a part of the value creation of labour. What is often said is that such work does not produce ‘surplus value’ – but surplus value is the calculated theft of labour capacity in both the trick of the wage, which pays only necessary costs of reproduction of labour power, and the trick of leaving responsibility for reproduction of that labour power to unwaged time, and to the sphere of consumption by and large. Surplus value is a lie that serves capital in that it does not ‘pay’ for what it takes. And then, it becomes a double violence. If we think with the notion of collective labourer, which includes all those involved in the creation of value, waged or not, then the collective labourer is not fully recognised for their collective value producing capacity, only doled out the necessary costs of reproducing individual labour powers – a few are reimbursed, and even then efforts are made, with the pressure of the ‘rest’ to push those necessary costs – the wage – to its minimum. Then, with this minimum, having produced these commodities – and a surplus – through badly, and only partially remunerated, social collective effort, this collective social ‘worker’ then must buy back the commodities they have collectively made using the pitiful necessary costs given to the waged contingent of this social/collective labourer as a reword for the gift of value production of ‘surplus’ given for free to the capitalist.

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You write: ‘

The task is to radically reorganise the work, to revalue it, to bring it to the centre of our lives and our struggles. This is as much to identify all that is wrong with currently existing reproduction as much as it is to reclaim all that is necessary. From Black feminist scholars – such as bell hooks and Patricia hills Collins – we can also think of reproduction as belonging to a radical ‘homeplace’ – a place that is necessary to nurture, to value and to support – as a place in which we can retreat to and recharge our bodies after the cruelties and harm of capitalist work – and crucially where we can make plans, learn from each other to have courage to resist, and to teach our children to not only survive capitalism but to revolt against its discipline, rhythms and institutions of power.” (Barbagallo 2014 FF)

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Awesome. So when you say, and I am happy to see it stressed: ‘that the wealth of human society is not a collection of commodities – it just appears so. In fact, it is labour power, indeed it is humans and our activity and interaction with the world around us that produces the immense wealth of the world” – I want to say that use of labour power here can be a misconstrual if it is any one labour power. If we remember that the point of making that critique of the bad translation of the start of the English version of capital was to start out on recognizing that the trick of this appears – erscheint – is that the wage is also the ‘appearance form’ –erschienungsform – of value, and that by paying attention to the difference between Marx’s mode of presentation, which starts with the individual commodity, and the analysis, which moved from individual labour power to the social reproduction of the class relation, then when you say, ‘it is labour power, indeed it is humans’ the Umschlag or transformation that matters is that its plural humans, it is our collective social labour power, not the labour power bought for a wage at pitiful necessary cost, that is expropriated by the capitalists, and so must be expropriated in turn. The humans are many, labour power as an abstract individualistic capacity, skill or formation is not the class version of labour power that Marx will recognise when the expropriators are expropriated and the surplus is used for (the care of) all, because it belongs to all

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ahhh, fuck it, the muezzin is starting and I have again stayed up waffling on till the dawn call. I hope you have the good sense not to even bother reading all that. Lal salaam.